Smaller In-House Maintenance Staffs in US Power Plants Lead to More Term Contracts

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources Inc.; Houston, Texas). While power plants reduce maintenance staffs, contractors find an ever-growing need for their continued services. Natural attrition are the key words to the reduction of the large full time maintenance workforce in the continued trend to keep costs at a minimum in United States power plants. Much to the dismay of the plant maintenance and engineering managers that have historically overseen well staffed departments, the last few years have seen the over-head expenses of maintaining such staffs become cost prohibitive.

Maintenance departments have seen an average reduction of 3-6% in manpower over the past few years. While not replacing these people as they leave for other jobs or retire, the energy companies have found that cross training other power plant employees can fill part of the deficit created.

Another major concern looming on the horizon is the generation of baby boomers that are fast approaching the mandatory retirement age. A maintenance manager with a large power plant in Georgia stated his shared concern that A great number of our skilled labor force will be leaving in droves within the next five to ten years. The problem is a lack of skilled personnel to replace them.

The managers of maintenance, engineering and technical control are on the lookout for Term contracts with local vendors and contractors to energize the shrinking in-house staff of qualified maintenance people. The managers are responsive to this type of contract because they do not have to deal with stipend fees or travel expenses. A term contract is signed and the contractor is expected to respond to the plants emergency maintenance demands as needed by the plant. This can be both a blessing and a bane to the contractors. Many of the larger energy companies currently provide their own support services for the engineering and maintenance departments at the individual plants they own or operate. This has not proved to be the solution they had hoped for. Scheduling conflicts, emergency needs and the on going requirement for specialty contractors still leaves a deficit that the companies must outsource to fill.